An account of a lynching that took place in New York in 1892, forcing
the North to reckon with its own racism.
On June 2, 1892, in the small, idyllic village of Port Jervis, New York,
a young Black man named Robert Lewis was lynched by a violent mob. The
twenty-eight-year-old victim had been accused of sexually assaulting
Lena McMahon, the daughter of one of the town's well-liked Irish
American families. The incident was infamous at once, for it was seen as
a portent that lynching, a Southern scourge, surging uncontrollably
below the Mason-Dixon Line, was about to extend its tendrils north. What
factors prompted such a spasm of racial violence in a relatively
prosperous, industrious upstate New York town, attracting the scrutiny
of the Black journalist Ida B. Wells, just then beginning her courageous
anti-lynching crusade? What meaning did the country assign to it? And of
what did the incident forewarn?
Today, it's a terrible truth that the assault on the lives of Black
Americans is neither a regional nor a temporary issue, but a national
crisis. Black people are regularly killed by police, and the term "Jim
Crow" has found new purpose in describing the harsh conditions of life
for the formerly incarcerated, as well as the large-scale efforts to
make voting inaccessible to Black people and other minority citizens.
That what drove the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a "mobocratic
spirit"--a phrase Abraham Lincoln used as early as 1838 to describe
vigilantism's corrosive effect on America--frightfully insinuates that
mob violence is a viable means of effecting political change. These
issues remain as deserving of our concern now as they did 130 years ago,
when America turned its gaze to Port Jervis.
An alleged crime, a lynching, a misbegotten attempt at an official
inquiry, and a past unresolved--in A Lynching at Port Jervis, the
acclaimed historian Philip Dray revisits this time and place to consider
its significance in our communal history and to show how justice cannot
be achieved without an honest reckoning.
